Wednesday, September 5, 2007

I was recently sent this list via email of things to do to survive in this current real estate market. I tried to find it posted somewhere on the net with no luck. I don't know who wrote this list, if it was you, please let me know and I will be happy to give you credit. Not everyone in the new home industry can abide by everything on this list, but its a good list to consider.

10 Things You Have to do to Survive in Real Estate Right Now

1) You have to get and stay positiveYou have to see the opportunities! You have to stay motivated now. You have to think good, clean, powerful thoughts. You have to stay away from negative people. You are going to see some pretty tough things happening in the real estate industry. An all out, and unified negative media blitz is underway on housing. YOU have to stay positive. It will continue for many months to come. You will see real estate companies biting the dust, merging, failing. YOU have to stay positive.

Tensions are running high. People are scared. Angry. Confused. Uncertain. Apprehensive. Your co-workers are, your Broker or Sales Manager would have to be clueless not to be chewing their nails a little right now too. YOU have to stay positive.

You will see massive job losses throughout the entire housing sector, from loggers to construction workers, to retailers, to finance, people are losing their jobs. YOU have to stay positive. How you get your motivation matters little to me, but now is the time to get back to it. And I cannot tell you how serious I am about this attitude thing. It is the foundation. Everything emits from it. YOU have to be positive every day, and that will take some concentration.

2) You have to get and stay focusedYou can't just wander through the day, now you have to plan and execute. You have to break your physical work cycle and find a different, more effective process. You have to work on those things that further your goals and eliminate time wasting and meaningless activities and motions. You have to learn to say, "no!" You have to learn to keep your mind of "finishing" the transactions you're on and working on those transactions that have a high probability of closing in your pipeline.

3) You have to get and stay competitiveOne of the things I have always kind of felt bad about in my career is that we are hired, literally, to help a company and its agents take business away from other companies and other agents. Companies don't hire us to continue to get what they have been getting, they hire us to get what they haven't been getting. And the only way-let me say that again in a more emphatic way-the ONLY WAY we can help them take business away from their competitors is to get them in a far more competitive mode. And if you're going to be successful in this business now, and in the near future, you need to really think this through. HOW are you going to be more competitive? WHAT are you going to do that is different? All of them, all of the who, what, why, when, where and how have to be covered now. YOU have to be better in salable, identifiable, and meaningful ways.

4) You have to get and stay creativeYou can't do more of what's not working. You have to think! You have to think about what the consumer wants. Not what you want. You will get what you want when you help enough other people get what they want. (Zig Ziglar). But none of that will happen in the old school way. You need new ways to do old jobs. It's just that simple my friend. You have to come up with a truly better way of doing business because your way isn't working.

5) You have to get and stay smartYou have to work with the "haves" now. You have no choice about this. You have to work with buyers who have down payments, and 700+ credit scores, and jobs. And if they don't, you have to walk. This is not the time to be a bleeding-heart, help everybody out, agent. You're in a tough market, you're going to have to toughen-up if you're going to be successful in it. That means rules, with few or no exceptions.

6) You have to get and stay pickyYou have to take listings that will sell and walk away from those that won't. You have to find sellers who really want to sell, enough to cooperate with you in every way, and they have to live in a home that is salable, and that home has to be in the price ranges that are selling-or walk away. You're going to have to take better listings, not just more listings.

7) You have to get and stay involvedNow, buyers are nervous about the financial side of buying a house. Stop sending them to the lender first. Sit down with people, talk to them straight about finances, credit, down payments, monthly payments, assets, liabilities, income, debt, all of it. Then, based on your determination, send them to a lender who can help them. But stop saying to people, "have you seen a lender yet?" two minutes after you meet them. Work with people, solve their problems. You'll get paid.8) You have to get and stay realisticThe market is going to be tough for a while, work harder and smarter. You are now as much in the finance business as you are the real estate business. If you need to learn more about finance, do so, now. In everything you do you have to ask yourself, "does this make sense?" The new, post credit crunch economy will require mostly that things make sense.

9) You have to get and stay visionaryThis will fix itself eventually. And housing will become a stronger economic force with a more solid foundation, which will add up to even better things. There will be far fewer active agents you'll actually have to compete with, big companies will grow in terms of the number of licensees that call them home, but their structure is suicidal in this market. Smaller is the new bigger and Broker/Owners will have a very hard time making this paradigm shift, they are so stuck on "body count" - their vision has to change, or they will go under, that's all there is to it.

10) Most importantly, you have to get startedEnough of the dull-witted, ambiguous speculation as to why all this happened. Figuring out why your buyer can't get a loan won't earn you a commission. Now it's about working on what will work, and getting started. What has happened, has happened, now what are YOU going to do about it. You have to get started at least thinking about these things. Sorting them out, prioritizing them and getting rolling in the new real estate economy.